Materials – Editing and Encoding in the Undergraduate Classroom

TEI transcription assignment using Walden manuscript

Participants in the October 15 session used the materials below for small- and full-group discussion of Thoreau’s revisions to the Walden manuscript. In addition, Prof. Rebecca Nesvet walked participants through an encoding assignment she and her students undertook with these materials in a capstone course at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, in Fall 2020.

“Former Inhabitants,” leaves for Paragraphs 3 and 4 (10/15)

Paragraphs 3 and 4 of the chapter in Walden titled “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors” were first written in the fifth (E) draft, then re-written in the sixth (F) draft. In this chapter, Thoreau memorializes some past inhabitants of Walden Woods, where he built his cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, including the formerly enslaved Cato Ingraham and Brister Freeman and a formerly enslaved woman he calls “Zilpha,” whose actual name was Zilpah. (Elise Lemire explores their lives and the history of slavery in Concord in her book Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts [Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2009].)

You can follow these changes as they were transcribed by Thoreau scholar Ronald Clapper in Walden: A Fluid-Text Edition, and compare them to their published versions, by using the drop-down menus to put the published version and the two drafts in adjacent columns.

Now that the Walden manuscript has been digitized, you can also use the thumbnails and links below to view the actual manuscript pages. Elizabeth Witherell, editor-in-chief of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (Princeton University Press) has prepared new transcriptions of the manuscript leaves, which you can download for comparison with the manuscript.

This Google spreadsheet contains links to all the images of pages in HM924, the manuscript of Walden at the Huntington Library, and correlates many of them with their corresponding paragraphs or paragraph segments as numbered in the fluid-text edition.